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Oranges and Rust: An Interview with Jeannine Hall Gailey and Jill Chan
I have long assumed that poets with a scientific background love science and poetry in equal measure, however I was also curious to find out to what extent science affects their poetry. Through a series of interviews, I made some surprising discoveries of my own.
Jeannine Hall Gailey is a Seattle-area journalist whose first book of poetry, Becoming the Villainess, will be published in the spring of 2006 by Steel Toe Books. Her poems have recently appeared in The Iowa Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and 32 Poems. One of her poems was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Studying for her MFA at Pacific University, she volunteers as senior poetry editor for Silk Road. Her chapbook, “Female Comic Book Superheroes,” is available from Pudding House Press and her website, www.webbish6.com.
Jill Chan was born in Manila, Philippines, in 1973. She has a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry, migrated to New Zealand when she was 21, and started writing poetry a year later. Her poems are published in Poetry NZ, Takahe, Trout, Deep South, Spin, and other magazines. She is the editor of the online zine, PoetrySz: demystifying mental illness.
I am curious to know more about your poetry and science background.
Jeannine Hall Gailey: I grew up the daughter of a professor of engineering and robotics and a journalism major/devoted poetry appreciator. So, there was no avoiding either science or poetry for me… I majored in Biology for my undergrad degree and considered medical school; I worked as a research assistant in a botanical genetics lab – fascinating stuff. After graduating, I decided against medical school and to try my hand at technical writing for a few years. I really enjoyed working with engineers and the fairly decent money, but ultimately it left me missing the artistic side of myself. I enrolled in a Masters’ Degree program in English, studying both creative and professional writing… I wrote a book about web technology in 2003 and [then] finally decided to devote myself full-time to poetry, to give it at least a fair shot for a few years.
Since then I’ve been focused on non-technical writing; I published a chapbook, “Female Comic Book Superheroes”, with Pudding House Press in January and spent a lot of time working on my first poetry book, Becoming the Villainess, which will be out Spring 2006 from Steel Toe Books. Last year, I started attending a low-residency MFA program, which has helped me focus on poetry and, hopefully, hone my skills even more.
Jill Chan: I have been writing poetry for ten years and have a collection of poetry, The Smell of Oranges, and an e-book, Telling Them Apart. I read poetry books, in translation or otherwise. Some of my favourite poets include Paul Célan, Fernando Pessoa, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Rae Armantrout, New Zealand poets Anna Jackson, Paula Green, and Kendrick Smithyman. I also frequent poetry boards and blogs. I think they could be good resources for finding new contemporary work. One poet that I like who writes ‘science poetry’ is the British poet Lavinia Greenlaw. One of the reasons I like poetry is because I think poetry is alchemy. It is for me a most potent and transformative area of study to work with.
I have a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry degree. I think I took it because I’ve been interested in the world behind the seen, what laws govern it, what models have helped us see it.
So how does your science background impact on your poetry?
Jeannine Hall Gailey: My poetry is less about science in its subject matter than it is about sci-fi, although references to technology creep into my poems on a fairly regular basis; more than that, I think, geek culture – comic books, video gaming, animé, etc – is very important subject matter in my work, because I want a certain kind of reader (maybe a computer programmer who doesn’t read a lot of poetry) to pick up my book and identify with the poems. …One of my favorite authors is Margaret Atwood, who writes sci-fi (or at least, her work has elements of sci-fi) and poetry.
Jill Chan: I think my interest in concepts and the distillation of materials to their essence comes from my science background. The clear almost detached method of crystallising an idea, to make it manifest, I think that affects the way I write.
Jill, which poem of yours do you think has an almost perfect mix between science and poetry?
I have a poem in The Smell of Oranges called “Quantum” where I think this reaching toward the unknown, if on a personal level, is most evident. I like to write ‘science poems’ that borrow scientific knowledge and employ it as a metaphor but in reality touch on the personal.
Quantum
I ask you questions,
feeling the bursts
of silence, your words
(when they come)
not lowered enough,
hang in the outermost
shell, almost
defying physics.The years
I’ve known you
fall discretely
into pockets,
your hands firmly
hidden, the clothes
in the way.
I find the scientific concepts embedded within this poem, alluded to by certain charged words such as ‘bursts’, ‘silence’ and ‘shell’, balance so delicately with the more human relationship at its core. Is this in fact a goal of yours, to write what you call ‘science poems’?
Jill Chan: Yes, I would like to write more science poems, if not overtly, maybe poems that have a balance of clarity and meaning, plus the reaching toward the unknown I mentioned.
Jeannine, how does science manifest in your poetry, and which poem of yours do you think illustrates this?
I’ve been writing lately a lot of mythology-based poetry, but I could definitely see writing a collection around scientific subject matter. Maybe something about chaos theory, dinosaurs (seriously, we need more dinosaur poems) and genetics… My poem, “The Taste of Rust in August”, was published in Pontoon 7.
The Taste of Rust in August
Knoxville afternoons in summer, lightning on the air.
The horses whinny, nervous; the chickens roost.Our chain-link fence is rusty. I like to taste it –
that metallic clean I imagine to be the flavorof lightning. My brother was hit once, carrying
a metal bucket to water the animals. It burnedhis arm, and left a funny taste in his mouth.
Mother says I have always sucked on spoons,licked lampposts, iron grates, jewelry.
She goes crazy about the germs.She says I do it because of what she calls iron-poor blood
and it’s true – there’s no rust in my skin at all,dull and transparent as wax paper.
I run around the yard for hours, chasing the lightning,tracing those fractal lines in the sky with my fingers
as the smell of ozone drives the dogs crazy.
This poem is very much present within the human realm and also draws on not only scientific concepts such as fractals and electricity, but plays with the idea of risk as well, touching upon the vulnerabilities of the human body from nature in the form of lightning, germs and disease, mental illness.
Jeannine Hall Gailey: Marianne Moore had a strong devotion for getting the details of the natural world into her work, so her poetry is probably what I’d point to as the perfect balance between the scientific and the literary. It always seems so effortless, and her vocabulary was brilliant.
Do you think science is poetic? Do you think poetry is a science?
Jeannine Hall Gailey: Yes, a lot of scientific theory and experiments are very poetry-worthy. Is poetry a science? Not purely. Poetry needs to lean on intuition and the subconscious for inspiration, then you can use your scientific methods, so to speak, on the poem.
Jill Chan: Yes, I think science is poetic. Science has a beauty as much as poetry. It is creative, and dynamic. It is meaningful. No, I don’t think poetry is a science in that there is a much more varied way of understanding poetry, of making poetry, than science. Poetry has a more open way of touching people that is dependent on each person’s experiences.
So, which satisfies you more (or less)?
Jeannine Hall Gailey: Writing a nice piece of code and working on botanical experiments was satisfying to one part of my brain; poetry satisfies a different part. I love to get e-mails from programmers who tell me how my technical book or articles helped them at work, but I love hearing from people who connected with my poetry even more. I think I might prefer poetry because I think it allows us to communicate with one another on a deeper level, which seems important these days.
Jill Chan: Poetry satisfies me more because I experiment with words now. I enjoy the surprise of working an idea, making things fall into place, learning through trial and error, connecting disparate things into something meaningful.
Interview by Ivy Alvarez of Ivy is here.
How Glass Breaks: Four Theories
1.
Brittleness
on the macroscopic scale
can be deceiving. Measured
in microns, the fracture surface
resembles the long-lost, infinitesimal
twin of a rent in metal –
that famously elastic break.
So too, then, with glass:
cavities as narrow as a few nanometers
open ahead of the crack,
not-glass
flowing together
in the last fraction of a second before
the wineglass shatters under
the bridegroom’s shoe.
2.
Atom separates from
individual atom
in rapid sequence
wherever the amorphous
solid – glass –
encounters stress.
The blind cane of an atomic
force microscope can tap
all along the edge of a crack
& find no sign of deformation,
no pits or pockmarks.
Glass must therefore be
as we’d always thought:
immaculately brittle.
3.
Atoms under pressure slip
& slide across each other;
nothing is simple. Friction
leads to atom-sized cracks
& the cracks widen into
the necessary cavities, yes.
But all along the fracture zone,
the same pressure
responsible for the break
makes the gaps snap shut
immediately thereafter.
Let’s call them nanovoids,
these model wounds,
healing as perfectly as if
they had never been.
4.
Approaching the fracture origin,
the surface of a crack appears
increasingly smooth. But under
an electron microscope, each region
shows the same kinds of features
at a finer & finer scale – a fractal
self-affinity. Beginning at ground
zero, we name these regions
mirror, mist, hackle,
macroscopic crack branching:
energy magnified in chaotic order.
Given an opening, given vibration,
atoms in the amorphous silica will
change partners – a choreography
of rings that first contract, then
join together, encircling ever
larger volumes until the last
bonds fail & the atoms
dance irrevocably
apart.
__________
Inspired by an article in Research: Penn State, “What Makes Glass Break,” by Walt Mills (online, 2005). Also consulted:
F. Célarié, S. Prades, D. Bonamy, L. Ferrero, E. Bouchaud, C. Guillot, and C. Marlière, “Glass Breaks like Metal, but at the Nanometer Scale.” Physical Review Letters 90, 075504 (2003).
J.-P. Guin and S. M. Wiederhorn, “Fracture of Silicate Glasses: Ductile or Brittle?” Physical Review Letters 92:21, 215502 (2004).
R. K. Kalia, A. Nakano, P. Vashishta, C. L. Rountree, L. Van Brutzel and S. Ogata, “Multiresolution atomistic simulations of dynamic fracture in nanostructured ceramics and glasses.” International Journal of Fracture 121:1-2, 71 (2003).
J. J. Mecholsky, J. K. West, and D. E. Passoja, “Fractal dimension as a characterization of free volume created during fracture in brittle materials.” Philosophical Magazine A, 82:17/18, 3163 (2002).
by Dave Bonta of Via Negativa
Time Piece
My mother’s clock stands in my hallway now, as silent as it was the day she died.
It’s a “grandmother” clock, barely six feet tall, with traditional woodwork and a maple case finished with that opaque stain they used in the ’60s — brown and bland and quite unlike the rest of my grizzled oaken antiques.
The clock was one of Mom’s prized possessions. She had a fair collection of prized things, to be sure, but it spoke to me more than the figurines or the china, I think, because of the sense of fragility it gave me. When she got it, around 1965, she threatened us kids in the direst terms with what she would do if we were to break it, and in all the decades after, it survived running children, rumbling trucks, teen-agers jumping down the stairs, bicycles in the living room and God knows what else.
Its Westminster chimes ran their gamut rather quickly. Mom claimed she liked them that way. I never knew why she wanted the clock, except possibly because her mother once had one — removed during a ’50s modernization, so I never saw it — or because her sister-in-law kept a huge one in her dining room, where it loomed imperiously over Thanksgiving dinners. Perhaps Mom’s clock was merely the capstone to the renovation of the living room, which got a new floor, couch and chairs around the same time.
For at least a decade, the clock reproached me when the house was quiet and I was wasting time, mournfully tolled the hours when I lay awake in sickness or worry, and chanted the quarters when I wanted to read just five minutes more. Mom adjusted it and kept it wound, and I suppose it spoke to me as she would have: “When are you going to get your homework done!” or, “You need to take out the garbage!” I never thought of her as fragile, but I felt the most acute anxiety when my brother would run past the clock, playing with the dog.
I liked it more when I came to understand how an escapement works and what regulates the orderly gears behind the face. Once I had another epiphany when I understood how a vibrating crystal might drive a digital clock’s tiny chip to count to 65,000 some 85,000 times a day — but there’s nothing in a digital clock to see. Give me the measured tick-tock of the pendulum any day. Our clock always needed some adjustment, however, and I always took its assertions with a grain of salt.
It stopped not because of an accident but from simple wear. Years ago, it quit because a fragile brass part expired. Dad didn’t know what to do about it and let it sit for quite a while, till Mom got mad at him and complained, and I intervened to take the works away and have them cleaned and fixed. I was proud to do something for them an adult could do, for they were always so self-sufficient. About that time, Dad complained that he had never liked the clock, for it echoed through the house at night and disturbed his rest — and as he grew deaf, it was a half-heard noise he had to stop and listen to in order to identify.
By the time Mom died, one of the clock’s brass chains, the one that held the heavy weight that rang the hour, had disintegrated into a bagful of separated links. Caught in the coils of Alzheimer’s then, Mom may not have even noticed. But the hands stood still until Dad died and we had to break up the household.
Returning home in my own grief, I un-swaddled the clock’s case, reinstalled the works and spent an hour painstakingly reassembling the fragmented chain. I wound the clock and it chimed again!
I kept it going, with frequent attention to the pendulum and its inability to keep pace with a church clock half a mile away, for about six weeks. Then one day the repaired chain jammed in its gears and, for safety’s sake, I pulled out all the weights again.
I figure that if I restarted the clock in Mom’s memory, now I should let it be quiet for a while, in Dad’s. And then, soon, I will have it repaired — for my own sake.
Written by P.
Moved
I’ve never had very many heroes, mostly because I prefer people in the round, with all their imperfections on display, and also because I think hero worship has been a scourge on humanity and on the earth. But ever since I first read about the life of Rosa Parks, almost twenty years ago in the one women’s studies course I managed to take at college, I have felt a deep reverence for her. She is a model not only of courage in rebellion against an oppressive social order, but also of consciousness and selflessness. The criticism sometimes heard – that the homage paid to Parks is somehow unjustified, because some other folks before her displayed similar courage in defying segregation – misses the point, I think. That one, spur-of-the-moment yet fully prepared-for act will earn her an immortal mention in the chronicles of our would-be civilization, but it does neither her nor us any good if we fail to learn from it.
“I Shall Not Be Moved,” they sang. Rosa Parks–followed quickly by leaders in the anti-segregation movement, and soon thereafter by the entire African-American population of Montgomery, Alabama–found and occupied the unmoving pivot-point of a great lever. In her own words,
People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
I daresay she would have little use for us now, scrambling for appropriate adjectives in our efforts to eulogize her. How silly of me, the tears welling up last week when I heard about her passing, and now again as I read excerpts from the speeches given in her honor as she lay in state under the Capitol rotunda. Try and live a worthy life yourself, she’d probably say, with a hint of exasperation. But these tears aren’t really for you, Ms. Parks. They’re for us.
by Dave Bonta of Via Negativa
qarrtsiluni 